tele9752wikiaorg-20200213-history
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What is said is of primary importance, but how it is presented is also important. What is said The goal of each page in this wiki is to help someone understand the concept which is the subject of the page. Thus, pages should describe the concept, usually in more words/depth than appears on the corresponding slide, just as lectures usually provide more verbal description of points than appears on slides. Pages should not just provide more data about the concept, e.g. a page about the ICMP MIB probably won't be easier to understand if the text from the RFC that defines the MIB is pasted into it, but would help understanding if it makes meaningful groups of the many objects that make up that MIB and relates those to concepts that the reader already understands. The page should link to extra resources that may be help someone understand the subject, e.g. specific sections/pages of books or to web pages that are relevant to that wiki page. Wiki pages should not repeat each other, i.e. make extensive use of links to link to other wiki pages that provide details about topics that your wiki page refers to. There are several advantages to linking to a topic rather than providing a brief description of the topic: *The linked page can provide more detail for interested readers than can fit in your page which must also cover its own subject. *Repeated brief descriptions on multiple pages: **May be inconsistent **Are hard to maintain, e.g. improvement to one description may not be made to others **May bore readers who are already familiar with the subject Pages must not plagiarise, e.g. copy material from other sources without properly citing the source. Use the citations and references facilities of Wikia to cite sources. Citing of sources is important for several reasons, including giving credit to the original authors of material, allowing readers to check the sources of facts, and allowing readers to obtain more detailed information when they seek it. The ideal wiki page should: #'Clearly describe the concept' that is the subject of the page. The subject is defined by the lecture slide that has the corresponding identifier. Of course, the lecturer created the lecture slide and will mark the wiki, so you might expect that the lecture slide constitutes a "clear description" but note that the lectures also include verbal discussion of the points on the slides, and the wiki page add something equivalent to that verbal discussion to augment what appears on the slides. #'Be concise'. A rough guide is that the user should have to PageDown at most once to read the description of the subject on a page. Of course, pages lengths will vary because of varying subjects. Don't think that you have to fill out the page. Too concise is terse and conflicts with the 1st goal. Being concise is also at odds with the third goal of leading to additional information; if additional information is included in the page itself (rather than through a link) then it should probably be located at the bottom of the page, after the main description of the subject of the page. #'Link to related information'. Link to other wiki pages. Link/refer to external sources of additional information. May also include additional information, but locate it at the bottom of the page and use sections to separate it from the main description. #'Be properly formatted' - see guidelines below and page header guidelines. #'Give proper credit to sources'. It should not plagiarise. How it is presented All pages must be written in English. The Wikia tips give some tips about editing wiki pages. Formatting content Wiki formatting preferred over HTML; in particular don't use HTML font formatting and colours for simplicity. See also Help for wikitext and the list of HTML tags supported by Wikia. Useful and justifiable HTML tags include for teletype text, and for preformatted text blocks, such as this: Line 1 of example of preformatted text Line 2 of example of preformatted text Try to avoid images that include text (e.g. screenshots of terminal sessions / command prompts), and instead insert such content as text when possible, since text is easier to search. Use images when the content cannot be readily expressed as text. Do not copy text formatting when pasting content. i.e. content text should unformatted rather than of particular font type and size from PDF/PPT file from which it might have been copied. Page footer Sections that may appear are listed below. They are a subset of Wikipedia's Standard appendices and footers See also This should point to other TELE9752 wiki pages that are related to the topic of this page. "related" here means peer - not dependencies or consequences. In this section, include a link like Corresponding TELE9752 lecture slide that properly links to what it says, References This should point to sources of specific facts used in the page. Further reading This should point to other (non-TELE9752 wiki) sources of information about the topic, which can provide complementary coverage of the topic. Often this section would link to the same topic on Wikipedia, the ID of the slide that this page is based on, and to text books that cover the topic. Common areas for improvement *Navigation table missing or not linking properly to other pages *Repeating text that belongs on other pages. e.g. a page about "SNMP security" should not start with a paragraph defining what SNMP is, but instead should link to another page that defines what SNMP is. *Unnecessary HTML formatting. You should at least once use the buttons on the top-right corner of the editor to edit the page in Source (rather than Visual) mode and try to replace HTML with wikitext wherever possible. *Broken links. Links to wiki pages that don't exist are usually shown in red. Test that links to web pages work, and if they do *Images - especially those broken when wiki moved from Blackboard *Improper Links, e.g. to web sources when the topic is covered in this wiki, perhaps in the list of Prerequisites